Dunk Tank

by Kayla Czaga

The much-anticipated second collection from Gerald Lampert Memorial Award–winning poet Kayla Czaga, Dunk Tank is a rich, imaginative, and sometimes absurdist exploration of the landscape of the body and of adult life.

In the title poem of Kayla Czaga’s sophomore collection, a teenage speaker is suspended between knowledge and experience, confidently hovering before the world plunges her into adult life. Dunk Tank reimagines the body as a strange and unknowable landscape: full of cancers that “burst like blackberries,” a butt that could run for prime minister of Canada, and the underworld lurking in Winona Ryder’s pores. Clouds become testicles and uteri turn into goldfish, flickering and fragile, but still ultimately glowing. These poems explore the varied and strange relationships that underpin a young woman’s coming of age, from inconsequential boyfriends to the friendships that rescue us from “grey daily moments.” Unsure of how the world works and her part in it, Czaga forges a landscape of metaphor and gleaming, dense imagery. Dunk Tank is playful and dark, comic and disturbing.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 9, 2019

About the author

Kayla Czaga grew up in Kitimat and now lives in Vancouver, BC, where she recently earned her MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Her poetry, non-fiction and fiction has been published in The Walrus, Best Canadian Poetry 2013, Room Magazine, Event and The Antigonish Review, among others.

For Your Safety Please Hold On is her first book.

For Your Safety Please Hold On was shortlisted for a 2015 Governor General's Award., and won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. The judges (Sonja Greckol, Charles Mountford and David Seymor) commmented that "Czaga unfulrs experience, observation and development with complexity and more than a little humour suspending a reader between this page's moment of assurance and the next moment's unsettling observation."

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite collection of poetry that I've read in a long, long while.

Seeing how well Czaga's poetry has developed since For Your Safety Please Hold on (which I also loved) is genuinely breathtaking. I have mixed feelings about the constant description of writing as a "craft," but for Czaga's it does seem appropriate. She's a true-blue Wordsmith, and reading what she does with words feels just as astonishing as watching a black smith bend metal. You almost feel a little envious, but at the same time, her poems are so inseparably hers you can't really stay in that emotion for long. The joy of reading her blights the feeling out, anyway.

There is a tension in Dunk Tank between what is shared with the reader, what is relatable and shared; and what is loudly and singularly personal, what belongs to Kayla or at least the speaker of the poems that the reader understands to be her. The chapter focusing on girlhood is filled with images anyone who was ever a the girl who read too many books will recognize. The sense of humor that permeates Dunk Tank is always a familiar and knowable one. Yet, Czaga inevitably returns explicitly or implicitly back to what cannot be shared: the iconic image of her father, the sense of isolation that comes from being small town kid who moved away, and countless stories of friends and moments unknown to the reader. The book feels unsure of how much it wants to give it's audience, how much these strangers really deserve these radically personal stories, and yet it gives them anyway. Connection and disconnection between people were themes in FYSPHO as well, but to me Dunk Tank approaches them in a more mature way— asking less to be understood and more to be recognized as something that cannot truly ever be.

anyway TL;DR is I adored this book and I think it deserves all the awards.

[Maya 維欣 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Course reading turned lifelong obsession. I love Czaga. Nobody expresses girlbrain like her.

[Dani · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really connected with this collection, being of the same generation as Czaga and having lived in many of the same places as her over the years. It felt a lot like going through my journal or Facebook timeline (if it were more poetically written!) remembering events and thoughts I had forgotten, putting me right back in those moments.

The free-verse was well-constructed and I'm excited to see where Czaga will go as a writer and poet.

[Alexander Kosoris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dunk Tank is a collection of poetry of the sort I quite enjoy, in form, specifically. Though Czaga writes free verse, she maintains a structure through the repetition of similar sounds rather than tight rhymes, and this is used to great effect within her work in at least a few ways, all related to the way this influences the rhythm and flow. For one, the author is able to create cohesive threads throughout poems, either by continually repeating one sound throughout at various intervals or by only using it periodically to suggest a related nature between lines, such as within the poems “Sleeping is the Only Love” or “Eel.” A reader’s attention can also be directed through a sudden build-up of the sound, as in “Fun and Games,” or through a sudden divergence from a sound that had otherwise been repeating throughout the piece, as in “Michelle on Instagram.” And stepping away from tight rhymes in this way keeps this on more of a subconscious level––easily felt but difficult to see. But even if you can’t see it, when it’s done well, it sure resonates. (Look to the sixth verse of Czaga’s poem “Girl Like” for an example of multiple sounds overlapping and interweaving in spectacular fashion.)

And, of course, the structure is only a part of the collection, albeit one I apparently want to talk and talk about. The general content deals with a loss of innocence, about loneliness and emptiness, and about the desperate yearning to fill the hole inside, all evoking a sense of being catapulted into adulthood too soon. Feeling lost; feeling unprepared. And the author is always inventive in her metaphors and images that bring these concepts to life, although this occasionally eroded my enjoyment at least a little. The why was perhaps discovered when I compared a Dunk Tank poem I disliked, “Good Without the Guacamole,” with a Charles Bukowski poem I like quite a bit that it reminded me of, “numb your ass and your brain and your heart––” from Love is a Dog From Hell. (Both poems use the mundane as a kind of backdrop for some sort of emotional or psychological distress; otherwise, they’re quite dissimilar.) Coming across the Bukowski poem recently was probably the key to understanding this somewhat elusive idea, because I admire his writing for its natural honesty. And it’s on display here, the way he presents his problem without ceremony, he moves into the seemingly unrelated description of a television show, and then brings it back to the problem elegantly. The trouble with Czaga’s, conversely, is this notion of presenting a concept and immediately, overtly forcing meaning onto it. Doing so not only creates a choppy flow, but it also cultivates a feeling of insincerity.

Keep in mind that this is the exception more than the rule. So much within Dunk Tank is smart and skilfully written. It’s heartfelt, though, honestly, quite sad.

[df parizeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Czaga is part of a new wave of poets who are picking up where the Imagists left off and bringing their aesthetic eye into contemporary verse. Balancing the natural world with the encroachment of urban/technological sprawl, Czaga is able to craft poems that speak to the beauty of living the world right now, at this very moment in time.

"Dunk Tank" celebrates the experience of growing up a part of Gen-Y in ways that I believe will bring in younger readers disenchanted with poetry due to their scholastic experience with the genre, while simultaneously creating a bridge with older generations to better understand this experience.

[Ampersand Inc. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really connected with this collection, being of the same generation as Czaga and having lived in many of the same places as her over the years. It felt a lot like going through my journal or Facebook timeline (if it were more poetically written!) remembering events and thoughts I had forgotten, putting me right back in those moments. The free-verse was well-constructed and I'm excited to see where Czaga will go as a writer and poet.

[Emma Doucette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it!!! Some poems stood out to me more than others, but I liked the collection as a whole.

[Allie Pell]

The cover is the cutest thing ever. And no I did not finish this book. But I caught the drift for sure

[Michelle M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Czaga’s use of imagery, metaphors and alliteration is wonderful. I enjoyed the last 3rd to 4th parts of the book more, but the collection as a whole is fantastic nonetheless.

[Lysa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't finished Dunk Tank , and already giving it a 5 * rating. Girl Like 👍👍
Tech support 😂. Mosquitos the last from Dunk Tank is long , but so well read.

[Degan Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful imagery and delightful dips into the collective unconscious paired with personal anecdotes and details.